* Richard Lalor Shiel had enjoyed a checkered career. He had studied for the Catholic priesthood. Then, with a view to the Bar, he entered Trinity College. When he was only about twenty years of age he wrote a tragedy. He followed this up with other plays, the most popular being “Evadne, or the Statue.” In 1822 he was called to the Bar. In the same year he allied himself with Daniel O’Connell. He entered Parliament in 1831. Later he was Vice-President of the Board of Trade, and subsequently Master of the Mint Gladstone, in 1877, described Shiel as “a great orator with a very fervid imagination and an enormous power of language and strong feeling.”--E. D.
Another of Lever’s Irish friends of this period was Catharine Hayes: a biographical sketch of the famous soprano appeared in ‘The Dublin University’ for November 1850.
‘Maurice Tiernay’ commenced its magazine career in May 1850. The story bore no author’s name, but the authorship must have been more than suspected by the readers of ‘The Dublin University.’ Lever was very diligent during this year. In addition to ‘Tiernay’ he had ‘The Daltons’ in hand. M’Glashan was anxious to procure short contributions from the busy man’s pen. He applied to him for a memoir of Samuel Lover,* but Lever declined to undertake anything so onerous as biography. Failing to obtain this memoir, M’Glashan inquired if Lever would furnish materials for a sketch of the author of ‘Harry Lorrequer.’ But Lorrequer was not to be drawn. He explained that though his taste was sufficiently gross to crave laudation, he would be expected to enter into a defence of his Irish character-sketching, and this he would not do. “I will not be a sign-post to myself,” he wrote. “Like old Woodcock in the play, my cry is--‘No money till I die.’”
* The memoir of the author of ‘Handy Andy’--a brief one-- was written by another hand: it appeared in the D. U. M. for February 1861.--E. D.
Writing to Miss Mitford, in November 1850, Mrs Browning makes a sad complaint of the Irish novelist. “We never see him,” she says; “it is curious. He made his way to us with the sunniest of faces and the cordialest of manners at Lucca; and I, who am much taken by manner, was quite pleased with him, and wondered why it was that I didn’t like his books. Well, he only wanted to see that we had the right number of eyes and no odd fingers. Robert, in return for his visit, called on him three times, I think, and I left my card on Mrs Lever; but he never came again. He had seen enough of us, he could put down in his private diary that we had neither claw nor tail,--and there an end, properly enough. In fact, he lives a différent life from ours; he is in the ball-room and we in the cave,--nothing could be more different; and perhaps there are not many subjects of common interest between us.”